Gigantic surround sound windstorm

I'm working on my sound design for Miss Witherspoon, and the script calls for the sound of wind whooshing along with flashing lights and physical wind to symbolize the main character's reincarnation. We're doing quadrophonic surround sound, and I have no idea where to start on making a huge windstorm that swirls around the audience.

I'm going to run the show off Qlab and I have a 4-channel interface, but I'm more concerned about actually creating the effect. Suggestions?

What tools do you typically use to craft your sound effects? Here at U.Va. we use Digital Performer, and you can pretty easily set up automation in there to make sounds go from one speaker to another to create effects like you're talking about.

Mike BenonisThe above comments are my own and do not reflect the views of my employer.

I'm either mixing in Logic or DP. I've been playing with Reaktor to craft a wind generation synth, but it doesn't sound good. I may end up running it live in Reaktor and mixing using a joystick (just because it would be totally awesome: there's no sane reason to do that though.)

Since you have access to DP, here's what I'd do. Create a new project, and set up a new output bundle for four outputs (instructions in the manual). Get your hands on some good wind tracks - there are a few out there. Good wind is the key to this project.

Then add one of the wind tracks to your project, and turn on automation. Assign that track to your multichannel output, hit automation record, and then start dragging the panner puck around as it plays. You can then bounce this out as a multichannel WAVE file and drop it into QLab. Maketh sense?

Mike BenonisThe above comments are my own and do not reflect the views of my employer.

It might be interesting to use more than one original sound file and randomly pan each one independently, that would seem to create much more of a swirling effect than just one sound being panned about.